Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [165]
In 1997, Japan finally legalized transplants from brain-dead patients. The «legalization» involved so many compromises and restraints that two years later only one liver transplant and one heart transplant had taken place. Although the law has changed, dozens of desperately ill patients continue to raise money to travel abroad for organ transplants, as they have been doing for decades. For all intents and purposes, such transplants remain illegal in Japan.
In response to strong public discontent, the government set gyosei kaikaku, «administrative reform,» as a priority for most of the 1990s, but the real work in dismantling the top-heavy edifice of Japanese officialdom lags. Instead, in a titanic demonstration of tatemae conquering honne, much of the effort has gone into renaming the ministries. As of January 2001, several ministries have changed their names (and some have disappeared, subsumed into larger entities). For example, the Construction and Transport ministries are being combined with the National Land and Hokkaido Development agencies into a Land, Infrastructure, and Transport Ministry. At tremendous expense, these new ministries will shuffle personnel and departments between them, setting up new signs and offices to indicate their new functions-and then will go on to do business more or less as before. Halfhearted reforms such as this are endemic, and highly deceptive, if taken at face value. As for the investigations and scandals in government ministries, once public anger dies away, it's back to business as usual. «Reform» of this nature would be called «stagnation» in any other country.
William Sheldon, famed for his studies in anthropometry, drew a distinction between two fundamental types of human psychology, inspired by the mythical Greek brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus. Epimetheus always faced the past, while Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind, looked to the future. An Epimethean values precedent; a Promethean will steal fire from the gods if necessary in order to advance humanity's progress. In thinking about Japan's future, it's a good idea to briefly step aside from the mechanisms of bureaucracy and politics and look at psychology.
So far, the psychology of reform has been almost exclusively Epimethean: forced by public opinion, bureaucrats make minimal, often purely symbolic changes, while exerting most of their energies to protect the status quo. Reforms look backward, toward shoring up established systems, not forward to a new world. In general, Japan has settled comfortably into an Epimethean mind-set, and this is central not only to reform but to the overall question of how Japan failed to become a modern country. Modernity, if nothing else, surely means a love of the new. However, as we have seen repeatedly in this book, if new technology was not aimed at export manufacture – like cameras or cars – it never took root. Society frowns on people who steal fire from the gods. Too much fire too fast would undermine the role of officials in the Cold Hearth Agency, who tell people what to do with their flameless hearths, and it would bankrupt the powerful Hot Stone Cartel, whose existence depends on a lack of fire.
At the moment, the trend is toward an increasingly Epimethean bent. Change will get harder, not easier, as the population ages. At the very moment when Japan needs adventurous people to drastically revise its way of doing things, the population has already become the world's oldest, with school registrations on a strong downward curve. Older people, by nature, tend to be more conservative than young ones, and as they tip the balance of the population, it will be harder to make changes.
Meanwhile, youths, whom one would ordinarily expect to be full of energy and initiative, have been taught in school to be obedient and never to question the way things are. Young people are